Chapter 4

Assessing and Understanding Performance

Measure, Report, and Summarize Make intelligent choices See through the marketing hype Key to understanding underlying organizational

motivation Why is some hardware better than others for different

programs? What factors of system performance are hardware related? (e.g.,

Do we need a new machine, or a new operating system?) How does the machine's instruction set affect performance?

Performance

Which of these airplanes has the best performance?

Airplane Passengers Range (mi) Speed (mph)

Boeing 777 375 4630 610Boeing 747 470 4150 610BAC/Sud Concorde 132 4000 1350Douglas DC-8-50 146 8720 544

•How much faster is the Concorde compared to the 747?

•How much bigger is the 747 than the Douglas DC-8?

•How about passenger throughput (passengers x m.p.h.)?

Response Time (latency)

— How long does it take for my job to run?

— How long does it take to execute a job?

— How long must I wait for the database query?

Throughput

— How many jobs can the machine run at once?

— What is the average execution rate?

— How much work is getting done? If we upgrade a machine with a new processor what do we increase?

If we add a new machine to the lab what do we increase?

Computer Performance: TIME, TIME, TIME

Elapsed Time counts everything (disk and memory accesses, I/O,

etc.) a useful number, but often not good for comparison

purposes CPU time

doesn't count I/O or time spent running other programs can be broken up into system time, and user time

Our focus: user CPU time time spent executing the lines of code that are "in" our

program

Execution Time

Example

Example: Unix time command90.7u 12.9s 2:39 65%

u: user CPU time, s: system CPU time, 2:39 elapsed time

Q: How do you get the number 65%?

For some program running on machine X, PerformanceX = 1 / Execution timeX

"X is n times faster than Y"PerformanceX / PerformanceY = n

Problem: machine A runs a program in 20 seconds machine B runs the same program in 25 seconds Ambiguity when stated in Chinese

Book's Definition of Performance

Clock Cycles

Instead of reporting execution time in seconds, we often use cycles

Clock “ticks” indicate when to start activities (one abstraction):

time

seconds

program

cycles

program

seconds

cycle

Cycle Time

cycle time = time between ticks = seconds per cycle

clock rate (frequency) = cycles per second (1 Hz. = 1 cycle/sec)

A 2 GHz. clock has a cycle time

snanosecond 5.0910 9102

1

So, to improve performance (everything else being equal) you can either

________ the # of required cycles for a program, or________ the clock cycle time or, said another way, ________ the clock rate.

How to Improve Performance

seconds

program

cycles

program

seconds

cycle

Could assume that # of cycles = # of instructions

This assumption is incorrect,different instructions take different amounts of time on different machines.

Why? hint: remember that these are machine instructions, not lines of C code

time1s

t in

stru

ctio

n

2nd

inst

ruct

ion

3rd

inst

ruct

ion

4th

5th

6th ...

How many cycles are required for a program?

• Multiplication takes more time than addition• Floating point operations take longer than integer ones• Accessing memory takes more time than accessing

registers• Important point: changing the cycle time often changes the

number of cycles required for various instructions (more later)

time

Different numbers of cycles for different instructions

Our favorite program runs in 10 seconds on computer A, which has a 4 GHz. clock. We are trying to help a computer designer build a new machine B, that will run this program in 6 seconds. The designer can use new (or perhaps more expensive) technology to substantially increase the clock rate, but has informed us that this increase will affect the rest of the CPU design, causing machine B to require 1.2 times as many clock cycles as machine A for the same program. What clock rate should we tell the designer to target?"

Don't Panic, can easily work this out from basic principles

Example

A given program will require some number of instructions (machine instructions)

some number of cycles

some number of seconds

We have a vocabulary that relates these quantities: cycle time (seconds per cycle)

clock rate (cycles per second)

CPI (cycles per instruction)

Now that we understand cycles

Note

a floating point intensive application might have

a higher CPI

MIPS (millions of instructions per second)

this would be higher for a program using simple i

nstructions

Performance

Performance is determined by execution time Do any of the other variables equal performance?

# of cycles to execute program? # of instructions in program? # of cycles per second? average # of cycles per instruction? average # of instructions per second?

Common pitfall: thinking one of the variables is indicative of performance when it really isn’t.

Time = Instructions x Clock cycles x Seconds

-------------- --------------- ---------------- Program Instruction Clock cycles

Suppose we have two implementations of the same instruction set architecture (ISA). For some program, Machine A has a clock cycle time of 250 ps and a C

PI of 2.0 Machine B has a clock cycle time of 500 ps and a C

PI of 1.2

What machine is faster for this program, and by how much?

CPI Example (p. 248)

A compiler designer is trying to decide between two code sequences for a particular machine. Based on the hardware implementation, there are three different classes of instructions: Class A, Class B, and Class C, and they require one, two, and three cycles (respectively). The first code sequence has 5 instructions: 2 of A, 1 of B, and 2 of CThe second sequence has 6 instructions: 4 of A, 1 of B, and 1 of C.Which sequence will be faster? How much?What is the CPI for each sequence?

Numbers of Instructions Example (p. 252)

MIPS example (p. 268)

Two different compilers are being tested for a 4 GHz. machine with three different classes of instructions: Class A, Class B, and Class C, which require one, two, and three cycles (respectively). Both compilers are used to produce code for a large piece of software. The first compiler's code uses: 5 billion Class A instructions, 1 billion Class B instructions, and 1 billion Class C instructions.

The second compiler's code uses: 10 billion Class A instructions, 1 billion Class B instructions, and 1 billion Class C instructions.

Which sequence will be faster according to MIPS? Which sequence will be faster according to execution time?

A misleading question itself!

Performance best determined by running a real application Use programs typical of expected workload Or, typical of expected class of applications, e.g., compilers/editors, s

cientific applications, graphics, etc.

Small benchmarks nice for architects and designers easy to standardize can be abused

SPEC (System Performance Evaluation Cooperative) companies have agreed on a set of real program and inputs can still be abused (Intel’s “other” bug) valuable indicator of performance (and compiler technology)

Benchmarks

SPEC ‘89

Compiler “enhancements” and performance

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100

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tomcatvfppppmatrix300eqntottlinasa7doducspiceespressogcc

BenchmarkCompiler

Enhanced compiler

SP

EC

pe

rfo

rman

ce r

atio

SPEC ‘95

Benchmark Description

go Artificial intelligence; plays the game of Gom88ksim Motorola 88k chip simulator; runs test programgcc The Gnu C compiler generating SPARC codecompress Compresses and decompresses file in memoryli Lisp interpreterijpeg Graphic compression and decompressionperl Manipulates strings and prime numbers in the special-purpose programming language Perlvortex A database program

tomcatv A mesh generation programswim Shallow water model with 513 x 513 gridsu2cor quantum physics; Monte Carlo simulationhydro2d Astrophysics; Hydrodynamic Naiver Stokes equationsmgrid Multigrid solver in 3-D potential fieldapplu Parabolic/elliptic partial differential equationstrub3d Simulates isotropic, homogeneous turbulence in a cubeapsi Solves problems regarding temperature, wind velocity, and distribution of pollutantfpppp Quantum chemistrywave5 Plasma physics; electromagnetic particle simulation

SPEC ‘95

Does doubling the clock rate double the performance? Can a machine with a slower clock rate have better performance?

Clock rate (MHz)

SP

EC

int

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200 25015010050

Pentium

Pentium ProPentium

Clock rate (MHz)

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Pentium Pro

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More Recent Benchmarks

SPEC CPU2000 (Figure 4.5) SPECweb99: A throughput benchmark for

Web servers

SPEC CINT2000, CFP 2000 Ratings

Pentium-M Ratings

Energy Efficiency

Execution Time After Improvement = Execution Time Unaffected +( Execution Time Affected / Amount of Improvement )

Example:"Suppose a program runs in 100 seconds on a machine, with multiply responsible for 80 seconds of this time. How much do we have to improve the speed of multiplication if we want the program to run 4 times faster?"How about making it 5 times faster?

Principle: Make the common case fast

Amdahl's Law

Suppose we enhance a machine making all floating-point instructions run five times faster. If the execution time of some benchmark before the floating-point enhancement is 10 seconds, what will the speedup be if half of the 10 seconds is spent executing floating-point instructions?

We are looking for a benchmark to show off the new floating-point unit described above, and want the overall benchmark to show a speedup of 3. One benchmark we are considering runs for 100 seconds with the old floating-point hardware. How much of the execution time would floating-point instructions have to account for in this program in order to yield our desired speedup on this benchmark?

Example

Performance is specific to a particular program/s Total execution time is a consistent summary of performance

For a given architecture performance increases come from: increases in clock rate (without adverse CPI affects) improvements in processor organization that lower CPI compiler enhancements that lower CPI and/or instruction count

Pitfall: expecting improvement in one aspect of a machine’s performance to affect the total performance

You should not always believe everything you read! Read carefully!

Remember